The complexity of various categories of web sites (like for example e-commerce or telecommunication service providers web sites) can be very high. This is due to the fact that the web site includes a large number of web pages, and some of these web pages may include a large quantity of information. For an end user, it may a frustrating experience to access to a specific feature of the web site, located at a specific web page. Thus, assistance in navigation to a sub-resource (e.g. a web page) of an Internet resource (e.g. a web site) may be beneficial.
The owner of a web site usually includes one or several shortcut links on all web pages of the web site (or at least on a subset of the web pages of the web site). These shortcut links provide direct access to a specific web page of the web site, where a specific functionality is located. For example, a web site may have a public part and a private part; the private part being accessible only after a user logs in with his credentials. Thus, a shortcut link to a log-in web page may be displayed on every public web page of the web site. The shortcut link may consist of a clickable text or icon, or a selectable item in a menu.
The aforementioned optimization of the browsing experience, by means of shortcut links, is specific to each particular web site. It is the owner of the web site who decides how the web site should be optimized; including which features of the web site should be easily accessible by means of shortcut links, and where these shortcut links should be displayed. Consequently, the user experience may be different for each particular web site; even for similar web sites (for instance, two e-commerce web sites may offer a completely different user experience).
From a user experience perspective, it would be beneficial to provide an optimization of the access to particular web pages of a web site that is not dependent of a specific implementation of the web site.
An existing optimization of the access to web pages of a web site consists in segmenting the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) displayed in the URL bar of a web browser. Selecting a specific segment triggers the display in the web browser of a corresponding web page. For instance, we consider the following URL www.google.com/some/thing displayed in the URL bar. The page currently displayed in the browser corresponds to this URL. Selecting the segment google triggers the display of the web page corresponding to the URL www.google.com. And selecting the segment some triggers the display of the web page corresponding to the URL www.google.com/some. The limitation with this approach is that the optimized access to web pages of the web site is determined by the URL of the web page currently displayed in the URL bar. Referring to the previous example, an optimized access to a web page corresponding to the URL http://www.google.another is not possible with this type of optimization.
Further improvements to conventional navigation to a sub-resource of an Internet resource are therefore desirable.